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Evidence has emerged that the office of Major of London considers a photo (PDF, page 47) depicting a group consisting of: a man, a woman, a boy and a girl, all of whom are of European ancestry, to not "represent real Londoners".
Looking at the ethnic breakdown of the capital of United Kingdom, showing Europeans (still) account for over 50% of the population, it seems premature to declare media depicting them to be unrepresentative.
But even if the natives were succesfully reduced to a minority, one would expect that they should be overrepresented. This would consistent with the mainstram present narrative around representation. That the fractions of ethnic groups in media shouldn't mirror those of the general population, but since people exhibit racial ingroup bias, minorities would be less happy if they didn't see people who look like them.
Defenders of this branding guide have claimed this has nothing to do with race of the people in the image, but I have to wonder if they would thought so, if a photo depicting what appears to be family of four Pakistanis would be caption as "Doesn't represent real Londoners." in a branding guide of a rigth-wing anti-immigration politician.
Especially in light of darwin's description of working enviroment of advertising companies. He claimed that anti-white jokes were common and that even he made them.
This will have been the decision of an agency designer. If someone had said, "what because they're all white?" they'd have said no, because it's a cheesy "too perfect" stock image. Someone senior or the client might have noted the possibility of negative headlines like the ones that have ensued, and then they'd have changed either the picture or the wording of the "don't". (I work in London agencies and know how all these conversations would likely go -- I also know this document won't necessarily have been looked at all that closely by anyone in a position of authority; brand books like this are often makework by agencies to pad their fees and to help brand managers accrue power to themselves. Once you've made something like this, every bit of communication goes through your office to check.)
Now, did the all-whiteness of the image contribute to the sense that this is a clear example of a cheesy "advertising of the past" type image? Very probably. It's what agencies are all keen to avoid.
To me the more interesting thing is that there are journalists scouring every little going-on in public life for evidence of wokeness. Standard culture war stuff I guess but it's a goddamn brand book, one of the least read types of document in the world and not usually a source of scandal!
I think you're being too generous. As Tanista said, there is already a separate example of a staged stock photo. They didn't say the photo of the family walking looked fake, they said it didn't represent 'real Londoners'. The mayor's office has since claimed that this caption was added mistakenly, but that just begs the questions of which caption they intended to put there and why the photo was on that list in the first place?
The photo itself doesn't look staged or fake to me. It looks like a photo of a real (albeit photogenic) London family walking around the city.
Moreover, page 35 specifies that photography must be diverse. Page 33 specifies that all photos must 'reflect a recognisable, real and diverse London'. Given that there are (as far as I can tell) no photos in the guide which only include indigenous (BIPOC?) Britons, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the problem with the photo was the ethnicity of the family.
And as someone who works in or with this industry, I don't know if you're just not aware of the implicit rules that the rest of us notice because you're too steeped in them, but this is a textbook example of shoehorned multiracialism. Do you ever notice how every advert on TV these days has either multiple ethnic groups or interracial relationships? Or how every costume drama somehow includes at least one West African character regardless of the setting or era? This is the same thing.
Really? Unless you're saying that you don't count the ones with Khan in them, which is almost all of them and therefore cheating really, there are several with just him and white people. There's one of him with two white police officers, with the white woman in the coffee shop (the only other person being a white guy in the background), with just a different white woman in the 'air quality event photo' and one with a white couple in their flat. The one with people strolling around the market square also looks mostly like white people, though maybe one or two in the background aren't white.
No, I wasn't counting the photos with Khan in them. As the guide itself says multiple times explicitly, real Londoners are diverse. The British family walking alongside the Thames are not real Londoners (according to the guide), but because of his brown skin, Khan bestows legitimate Londonness (even if he is an Uncle Tom).
I don't think it's necessary to bend over backwards to ignore what the authors of this guide are bashing us over the head with:
p6: Brand principles: We reflect the city’s diversity and openness.
p32: Photography supports our message and is...diverse
p33: The photos we use should reflect a recognisable, real and diverse London.
p35: [Photography] reflects diversity
p42: We should show a true, diverse London that Londoners can relate to.
p43: To fully document the event, we use different perspectives [that are] diverse
p47: [British family] doesn't represent real Londoners
p48: [Preferred social media shots] show audience diversity and their reaction
p50: Audience - Showing diversity and their reaction
p52: Encourage diversity in images
I'm not disputing that they want racial diversity in their photographs. They clearly do, and that's fine. What I'm disputing is this bizarre notion is that because one of the 'bad' photos has white people in it therefore they think white people can't be Londoners, despite all the other white people in the good photos. What about the almost exclusively white street scene? That family actually doesn't look like an 'ordinary London one', the problem being their location especially along with general demeanour that makes them look like tourists.
I'd be more amenable to that explanation if the caption read 'photos of tourists' or 'staged demeanour'.
But it didn't, it said they don't represent real Londoners. Their complaint was specifically about representation, not about the staging of the photo. According to the authors of that guide, a British family with a father, mother and two children are not representative of real Londoners. The guide also included about half a dozen other mentions of how real Londoners are diverse.
Moreover, their explanation when caught was that the 'caption was added in error' which is about as plausible as 'my twitter was hacked'. Documents like this don't get made or disseminated without half a dozen people proof-reading them. They knew what they were writing, they just didn't expect any tabloid journalists to read it.
Epistemic charity means taking people at their word, it doesn't mean rewriting their words into something they never said.
They don't. The word 'represent' doesn't have to mean race. Tourists on a day trip do not represent real Londoners. And again, what about the almost exclusively white street scene?
Do you really think that they wrote 'this photo does not represent real Londoners' with the intention that the reader interpret this to mean 'these people look like tourists'. If they had wanted to say that the family looked like tourists, they could have written that. But they didn't, they wrote a caption which a normal person would interpret to mean that the photo has inadequate racial representation. If they meant what you're claiming they meant, they could have said that the caption was poorly worded. Instead they said it was 'added in error' whatever that means.
As for the street photo, I'm not sure which one you're referring to, but you answer your own question regardless. Mostly white is okay because this still has diversity, entirely white is bad because this photo is not diverse and therefore the people don't represent real Londoners.
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I won't try and speak for the designer but I can imagine different don'ts for staging a situation fakely on the one hand and casting in a way that looks inauthentic on the other. I can't stress enough how makework these things are. The more categories of 'don't', the better, from the agency's point of view. I also know how these things come together, it could easily be a junior designer doing a quick web surf for images that they think look intuitively wrong for the brand, and then they try and think of various categories for why they look wrong so it looks structured and scalable and keeps clients convinced that this is not smoke and mirrors made by failed artists, but real rigorous MBA type stuff. How can we produce a lot of rules and stuff to sell the client is the guiding principle (can you tell I've had bad experiences with brand guidelines?).
I'm very aware that ads tend to try hard to 'represent' for a few reasons, and so if there are two people one will probably be non-white. The decisions are taken per piece of communication, and there are not large casts in all ads, so this has lately led to some kinds of minority over-representation (I don't know what the situation would be if all ads had a cast of thousands, enabling them to more accurately represent the actual demographic mix!).
A photo of a good looking, carefully dressed white nuclear family can easily come across as cheesy for a few reasons, especially that that is how the much mocked ads of the past looked. Agencies want to be seen as modern.
All this is fairly dumb but I think the causation is mostly due to dumb industry dynamics, with ideology part of the mix but not the whole story.
But again, the authors didn't write that the photo of the British family was cheesy or staged, they said they weren't real Londoners. In a guide where they also said (multiple times) that real Londoners were diverse. There's really no ambiguity about what they thought here.
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